Many consumer electronics devices, such as televisions and other displays, set-top boxes, media players, and video games consoles, may be controlled using infrared remote controllers. However, some consumer electronics devices, especially computers such as desktop or laptop computers, tablet computers, and smartphones do not support an infrared interface.
In a separate field to that of infrared controllers, protocol translators (which are also known as protocol converters) are devices that are used to translate or convert signals from one protocol language to a different protocol language. Thus, protocol translators are used to enable two different devices, that implement different respective communication protocols, to communicate with one another.